Upgrade Will Give LSI Logic Customer 1.7 Petabytes Of Capacity

Many companies must deal with very large files. Others must get information to customers very quickly. Rarely do those two requirements go together.

But in at least one case, they will.

A pending storage upgrade project will give CGG 1.7 petabytes of storage capacity for its business, which involves processing images of the Earth for oil companies. A typical CGG data file, such as images from deep below the ground and the ocean, is a terabyte in size.

Guillaume Cambois, executive VP of IT at CGG, explains why the company endures the double whammy of huge, complicated images and superfast delivery to oil-company customers. "When oil went down to $10 a barrel, our customers more then ever wanted faster turnaround of images," Cambois says, "so we needed storage that could match our massive computing power."

Next, he explained why he chose LSI Logic over much bigger storage vendors to provide that huge amount of capacity. He did benchmarks comparing LSI Logic storage using low-cost ATA disks to hard-disk storage and tape storage. Some tape will remain for long-term archiving, but the cost of ATA drives on LSI systems was close enough to tape to allow replacement.

"We chose LSI for reliability, data-access speeds, bandwidth, and cost," Cambois says. He hopes to have the new storage up and running within 12 months, to support 250 projects going on simultaneously worldwide.